In a New Orleans courtroom one morning last November a team of
corporate attorneys appeared before a judge to ask that she dismiss a
lawsuit that could cost their clients billions of dollars. The lawyers
represented almost 100 oil and gas companies, including such giants as
Chevron and ExxonMobil. The plaintiff was the board of the public
Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East. It had asked U.S.
District Court Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown to hold the oil and gas
industry partially responsible for the disappearance of huge swaths of
Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, which have historically been buffers
against such violent storms as Hurricane Katrina. The flood protection
authority wanted the judge to require the companies to help pay the
estimated $50 billion dollar cost of restoring those wetlands, or else
pay to construct other flood-protection structures in their place. It
was, the New York Times had declared, “the most ambitious environmental lawsuit ever.”

Ryan Gibson

John Barry '68.

John Barry ’68 sat in the first row of the courtroom gallery, an island
of tweed and khaki in a sea of charcoal gray. Barry, the man most
responsible for the lawsuit, was—and still is—its most passionate
proponent. He’s not a lawyer, but rather a well-respected, best-selling
popular historian with a knack for producing deeply researched volumes
on long-ago events that remain stubbornly relevant. In Louisiana none
proved more timely than his 1997 Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
It established him, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, as an
authority on efforts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to
control flooding throughout the low-lying region. After Katrina struck
in 2005 and some of the Corps-constructed levees protecting New Orleans
collapsed, Barry used his contacts and clout to try to help. The
decision moved him from the study into the political arena, from author
to government official to environmental activist, and, ultimately, to
thorn in the side of the powers-that-be, including Louisiana Governor
Bobby Jindal ’92, who would later become a candidate for the Republican
nomination for president.

Barry started running into trouble back in 2007. He’d just been
appointed to a new regional levee authority established
post-Katrina to ensure that the people overseeing the area’s
environmental defenses against future hurricanes were technical experts
instead of political insiders. As Barry grew increasingly frustrated by
the lack of money available to pay for Louisiana’s grand plan to
rebuild the wetlands that once absorbed the worst Gulf of Mexico tidal
surges, he realized that a drastic solution was needed. So in 2013, as
vice chair of the flood protection authority, he convinced his
colleagues to file suit against the oil and gas industry.
It was an audacious move that made him an instant folk hero to those
who’d long felt that the powerful, lightly regulated industry had
earned huge profits while degrading the environment. But the move also
turned Barry into a lightning rod for those who viewed the industry as
a major supplier of good jobs and state revenue that had done
everything the government asked.

Many, including Jindal, believed that, by filing the lawsuit, the
levee board had abused its power and exceeded its legal authority.
“We’re not going to allow a single levee board that has been hijacked
by a group of trial lawyers to determine flood protection, coastal
restoration, and economic repercussions for the entire state of
Louisiana,” Jindal said. When Barry’s appointment on the flood
authority was up for renewal, Jindal refused to give him another term.

This change in status did nothing to weaken Barry’s resolve. To him,
the issue is simple. State regulators, he believes, have failed to
enforce the oil and gas companies’ permit obligations to repair
whatever damage they cause. “The message to these companies” in the
lawsuit, Barry says, “is ‘Keep your word, obey the law, and take
responsibility for your actions.’”

The oil and gas industry has been drilling in Louisiana’s coastal
zone since the early 1900s, and today a majority of domestic offshore
oil and gas comes from the state. In addition, much imported oil is
delivered there. Over the decades, the industry has built thousands of
miles of canals and pipelines in Louisiana to move all this petroleum.
According to the flood protection authority’s lawsuit, thanks to this
“mercilessly efficient, continuously expanding system of ecological
destruction that injects seawater, which contains corrosively high
levels of salt, into interior coastal lands, killing vegetation and
carrying away mountains of soil,” the industry “has ravaged Louisiana’s
coastal landscape.” The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that, since
the 1930s, Louisiana has lost about 1,900 square miles of its
shoreline. All its wetlands could be gone within 200 years. The U.S.
Department of the Interior estimates that oil and gas development has
been responsible for anywhere between 30 and 59 percent of that loss.
(The industry has put the figure at around 36 percent.)

In a state as heavily dependent on oil and gas jobs as Louisiana,
asking the industry for billions of dollars, as the lawsuit in effect
does, is bound to raise alarms. The industry estimates that in fiscal
year 2013 it paid about $1.5 billion in Louisiana state taxes, which
represents almost 15 percent of taxes collected. About 65,000 people
work for oil and gas companies in the state, and the industry claims it
generates about $20 billion a year, directly or indirectly, in
Louisiana household income. Not surprisingly, oil and gas industry
lobbyists play a prominent role in the state and contribute readily to
political campaigns. Last year, for example, a consortium of Louisiana
environmental groups estimated that Jindal had received over $1 million
in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry over the
previous decade. No wonder few elected officials endorsed Barry’s
crusade.

Until 2007, Barry was known as the author of a half dozen sweeping,
meticulously detailed, award-winning history books. His most recent, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
explores the fundamental relationship between church and state in
America. Because it was published in the middle of the 2012
presidential election cycle, it offered useful background for an issue
that was often discussed. His 2004 best-selling The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,
chronicled the 1918 pandemic, and it came out just as the outbreak of
bird flu ignited new fears of a global health emergency.
Soon Barry was consulting with public-health officials and publishing
articles in general-interest and scientific publications. The book led
to commencement speeches at the Johns Hopkins and Tulane schools of
public health and landed him an academic appointment at Tulane, where
he keeps an office and is both a distinguished scholar at the Center
for Bioenvironmental Research and an adjunct faculty member at the
School of Public Health. “I discovered that I knew something that was
of value,” he says, and “that people who are experts in the field
accept it.”

It was Rising Tide that made him a household name in his
adopted home town of New Orleans. The book focuses on the most
destructive river flood in U.S. history, the Great Mississippi Flood of
1927. Although the flood was little known—Barry says he first came
across it when he read a fiftieth-anniversary account in a local paper
during an earlier stint in New Orleans coaching football at Tulane—it
changed the way the country managed water. So vast was the destruction,
in fact, that it eventually prompted the Corps to design and build the
system of levees and floodways that still seeks to tame the lower
Mississippi. The aftermath also upended outdated social structures and
racial codes in Louisiana, helped elect Huey Long governor of Louisiana
and Herbert Hoover president of the United States, and provided fuel
for the great African American migration north.

Rising Tide earned the Society of American Historians’ Francis
Parkman Prize as the year’s best book of American history. Its details
resonated in particular among those who still live with the flood’s
aftermath, which includes questionable water management decisions by
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and widespread corruption among levee
authorities. The story of how New Orleans elders dynamited a downstream
levee to save a wealthy part of the city came back in urban legend form
after Katrina struck some of the same poor areas and flooded them. The
authorities sacrificed their neighborhoods once, the conspiracy
theorists reasoned, why wouldn’t they do it again?

Map sourced from USGS and NASA

The delta as seen from space in 2014. To see an interactice map of the coastline erosion since 1922 click here.

After Katrina, Barry’s book quickly won a place on local must-read lists, alongside such classics as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Although as a coastal hurricane Katrina was not a river flood, it
focused national attention on Louisiana’s fragile coastline and the
actions—or inaction—of the Corps. Barry’s book found a second life on
the best-seller list and slowly but fatefully propelled its author into
the messy politics of flood control.

A recent article of faith in Louisiana is that one reason at least
some of New Orleans’s flood-control levees had not held up against
Hurricane Katrina was the incompetence, balkanization, and long history
of political corruption among local levee authorities. A citizen-driven
reform drive sprung up, and the state constitution was amended in 2007
to create several regional flood authorities, which were meant to
depoliticize, centralize, and professionalize flood-protection
oversight. Using a list provided by a blue-ribbon panel, then-Governor
Kathleen Blanco appointed engineers, accountants, and attorneys to the
authorities. She also chose Barry, who brought his familiarity with the
Corps, his policy gravitas, and a touch of star power.

Respected as it was, though, the board had no tools to deal with its
main challenge: finding the money either to fund the state’s rebuilding
of its vanishing coast or to build higher levees to compensate for the
buffering wetlands once provided. After the lawsuit was filed against
oil and gas companies, the reaction was immediate and brutal. This is a
state, after all, which is so tied to the oil and gas industry that
even the catastrophic 2010 BP oil spill fifty miles off the coast did
little to weaken the relationship.

“You expected there to be blowback,” says Gladstone Jones, the
attorney who ultimately took on the case. “What we did not expect was a
hurricane level six.”
One of those most outraged by the authority’s lawsuit was Jindal, who
quickly called for its withdrawal. Not only would he eventually use his
appointment power to replace Barry and some of his allies on the
authority, his new appointments would all be lawsuit opponents.
Jindal’s top coastal aide, Garret Graves, who has since been elected to
Congress, went so far as to call opposition to the suit a “litmus test”
for appointment.

Once removed, however, Barry joined with environmental groups to
form a nonprofit that would keep on pushing. In his own mind, Barry was
not acting as a bomb-thrower when he filed the suit. “I’m not sure I
consider myself an activist,” he says. “I got into this and
increasingly became active.” He believes he was acting as a responsible
official. After all, he had the unanimous support of the authority. Why
shouldn’t the oil and gas companies pay their fair share for their role
in wetland losses? And even if the lawsuit failed, Barry reasoned,
perhaps its pressure would bring the companies to the bargaining table
for a negotiated settlement. As Jones put it, “He’s a very diligent
researcher. He wouldn’t set a fire half-assed.”

Barry was heartened that the state Democratic Party endorsed the
suit, but with Democrats out of favor in the state, few voiced public
support. U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, who had been recently appointed
chair of the Senate Energy Committee and was playing up her ties to the
industry in her 2014 reelection campaign, first said she wanted to see
the lawsuit play out, but later pulled back. It was easier for those
who were safely retired to support action. Speaking at a joint forum at
Loyola University in New Orleans several months after the suit was
filed in 2013, three former governors, Republican Buddy Roemer and
Democrats Edwin Edwards and Blanco, backed the suit.

“We’ve all known that the channels that were dug and not restored
have contributed mightily to our land loss,” said Blanco, who had
pushed through the constitutional amendment creating the independent
authority. “I would predict that these major companies will come to the
table if the lawsuit isn’t destroyed in the political process … and
we’ll have a negotiated settlement. I think that they all know that
it’s long overdue and that they owe something back to the state of
Louisiana.”

During the state legislature’s spring 2014 session, bills were filed
to kill the suit and even to restrict the board’s independence. Barry
held scores of meetings with legislators, and while he says he often
heard supportive words in private, he could see that he was up against
a lobbying juggernaut. He says one lawmaker passed him a note letting
him know that “they get mad if they even see me talking to you.”

Nevertheless, the lawmakers passed one version, which Jindal signed,
saying, “This bill will help stop frivolous lawsuits and create a more
fair and predictable legal environment, and I am proud to sign it into
law.” However, the issue became moot in February of this year, when
Judge Brown rejected the lawsuit, ruling that the Southeast Louisiana
Flood Protection Authority–East did not have the legal standing to
pursue it. The authority has appealed the decision.

Frank Mullin

FOLK
HERO. Among New Orleans progressives, John Barry became something of a
public-policy celebrity. One Mardi Gras group named him monarch of its
parade, handing out plastic cups decorated with his photo and the words
"Holding the Oil Companies Accountable."

Why would a best-selling writer leave his study and take on one of
the country’s most powerful industries? Some skeptics have hinted that
he has been looking for material for his next book. Others say his ego
blinded him to the greed of trial lawyers smelling a big score.
Dismissing Barry as a “misdirected history professor,” a spokesman for
one pro-industry group wrote a letter to a Louisiana newspaper calling
these lawyers “modern-day Willie Suttons, who famously said he robbed
banks because that’s where the money was.” Yet his activism has also
earned him new fans. At Mardi Gras in 2014, one satirical and generally
progressive organization chose Barry as its parade’s honorary monarch.
On souvenir plastic cups, he’s pictured above the slogan, “Holding the
Oil Companies Accountable.”

By making the transition from wonk to warrior, Barry has undoubtedly
brought national attention to what can happen when one industry
dominates a state’s economy, and along the way he has attracted some
bipartisan support. Quin Hillyer, a contributing editor to the
conservative National Review and a former weekly conservative columnist
for the New Orleans Advocate, has been a harsh critic of the flood
authority’s legal strategy, but he still finds much to admire in
Barry’s single-minded pursuit of the cause. In February he and Barry
published an opinion piece emphasizing their points of agreement,
including the energy industry’s role in causing significant damage and
the urgency of aggressively combating the losses. They also proposed a
fee on industry to finance wetlands projects.

Hillyer says he and Barry hadn’t crossed paths before the lawsuit, but “I’ve been a great fan of his work. Rising Tide
was fantastic. Other than this disagreement, I was inclined to like
him.” But what struck Hillyer once they got to know one another was
that Barry “doesn’t leave well enough alone.” Barry, he says, is
“monomaniacally intent on saving and restoring coastal wetlands, which
is a tremendously worthy goal, and he is willing to try just about
anything to do it. I completely disagree with his legal judgment and
some of the tactics he used on the levee board, but I think he is very
well-motivated.”

Barry admits he may have been naïve about how quickly and easily
things would change in Louisiana, at least among those with political
power. “You know,” he says, “I really believed that once we stepped
forward someone else would step up. We were a heat shield, but
apparently it’s too hot for anybody else. Right now, frankly, I’m more
pessimistic than I’ve ever been that we will ever have a successful
program to preserve what can be preserved.”

He says he still thinks filing the suit was worthwhile, though. It
shifted the conversation, he believes, so that even lawsuit opponents
now concede that the oil and gas infrastructure is contributing to the
wetland loss that has weakened flood protection. Barry continues to do
what he can, offering advice, when asked, to localities filing more
limited lawsuits, monitoring bills in the state legislature, and
arguing his case to anyone who’ll listen. Asked whether the nonprofit
pushing the original suit is still active, he replies, “Well, I’m
active.”

But less so. He is beginning the transition back to wonk, although
now it’s doubtful he will ever again abandon his impulse as warrior. He
has started his next book project, and not surprisingly, its focus has
been the developments of the past few years. “I swore when I started
this,” he says, “that I was not going to write about it. I purposely
didn’t take notes in meetings, to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted.” Now
he plans to tackle the environmental plight of the coast from a “pretty
broad perspective.”

“It’s not a book about the lawsuit,” he says, “but it will include
the lawsuit. It will include all the causes, the dams on the Upper
Missouri, navigation interests, obviously pure geology.… The issue is
too big, and it’s not being addressed.” Because he is a historian, he
says, the book, “doesn’t have an agenda, at least in terms of
motivation for doing it. It’s just interesting. I write books that
interest me.”

Stephanie Grace is a political columnist for the New Orleans Advocate.

Comments (2)

07/17/15

Thanks. These online notes are helpful, reading Mark Blythe spirited analyses fun. Barry is a remarkable Brown man. Loved his Roger Williams and his spirit to follow the guide of independent thought is great

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

07/27/15

I have known John Barry since we went to elementary school together. He was always his own man. I am proud of his amazing books, including the Roger Williams book, which was so powerful, and I am proud of his defense of the Louisiana wetlands.

This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Name and Class Year:

Email:

Comment:

Code:*

The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.